The Glowing Edge

Tag: physics

  • Fibonacci Mail Art

    Fibonacci Mail Art

    The only thing better than getting mail art is getting Fibonnacci mail art.

    Well, I’ll allow that quantum mail art of some variety would be wicked cool too: imagine the possiblities for up, down, charm, and strange quark postcards. Or a Heisenberg card: you’d never know for certain both when it had been sent and when it arrived. But you could know one of those things.

    Sorry, I’ll stop with the geek jokes now. I was talking about my birthday.

    Because I had one last fall, and a month or so later my dear artist/author/sometime-zombie friend sent me this postcard with a Fibonacci series on it. She cuts this stuff out of extra copies of one of the books she’s published and then glues, sews, draws, and sends off dozens of these art-o-licious cards to people around the world, who also send her mail art back. She puts it all on her mail art blog and if you love getting mail art you should leave a comment over there and ask because she sends it to anyone, free! Amazing, in this day and age.

    But my birthday. Mary Jo knows I love to extend the party as long as possible, so she helps me with that by reminding me to keep on celebrating. My birthday cards can NEVER be late. It just isn’t possible. I’d go the whole year if I could do it and not be disowned by my family.

    And linking my birthday with art, extension of partytime, and Fibonnacci? Well, that’s quite a dramatic statement. A Fibonacci sequence falls into the following pattern:

    0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…

    Each number is the sum of the previous two. Sounds simple, right? It is simple, but it is also astonishing. This beautiful spiraling series is all over the place: in sunflower heads, pine cones, avacados, pineapples, honeybees, nautilus shells, and ferns. Many flowering, curling, swooping things are designed and unfold in a Fibonacci series.

    I might just spiral through my celebrations in an endless swoon of mathematical artistry.

    You never thought about it quite that way, did you?

    By the way, I just got her Christmas (New Year’s, Martin Luther King Jr., Valentine’s Day) card in the mail. I have the coolest friends imaginable.

  • This Just Proves I’m a Nerd

    This Just Proves I’m a Nerd

    I didn’t bring this book home, the Husband did, but it had a really cool cover so I picked it up. And I meandered through the first several chapters because anything that explains my husband’s brain to me is frequently of interest.

    And after those first few chapters (during which I learned that Pythagoras was so aware of the import of his formulation of the Pythagorean Theorem that he ordered 100 oxen barbequed, super cool!) I suddenly stumbled on a gem: a chapter giving the foundations of physics.

    EVERY time someone asks the question, “Is light a particle or a wave?” I experience a rush of ecstasy.

    “Yes!” I shout, then force myself to stillness so that I can fully appreciate the story of the double-slit electron experiment. It’s like opening the same Christmas present every year; I already know what’s inside, I’m thrilled to be getting it again, and I can’t wait to play with my quantum erasers and half-alive, half-dead cats. The Copenhagen interpretation is my launch point into the greatest joys of the universe.

    For me, physics is like a hot tub in the middle of a giant parking lot full of gravel. Mathematics is the gravel.

    For me, physics is like a hot tub in the middle of a giant parking lot full of gravel. Mathematics is the gravel. I am forced to walk barefoot over all that wretched, sharp gravel before I can sink gratefully into the steaming warmth of physics, both quantum and planetary.

    My husband, on the other hand, is a born mathematician. For him, the gravel is actually the glowing, thousand-hued crystals of an enormous multi-dimensional puzzle; one he would happily spend the rest of his life working to solve. The hot tub he barely notices as he gleefully sorts crystals into organized piles, stacks, and towers.

    Sigh. I guess what I meant to say is that we’re both nerds.

  • Slice of Life: The Perfect Saturday

    For the first time in over a decade I have some Saturdays off. It’s astonishing how wonderful they are, assuming you have no intention of grocery shopping or cleaning bathrooms. Here’s what my fabulous Saturday looked like:

    1. Sleep late
    2. Join the Ice in the kitchen where he’s making a double batch of biscuits. Cook the whole package of bacon at once by using three skillets at once (how very extravagant!)
    3. Enjoy a sit-down breakfast with four-fifths of the family (the First sleeps even later, now that he’s practically a teenager)
    4. Get back in bed.
    5. Watch movie trailers on the internet with all three boys and two cats, who have joined me on my bed: The Bee Movie (all four trailers), Enchanted, Fred Claus, Step Up 2, Dragon Wars, 27 Dresses, The Golden Compass, I’m Not There (the Bob Dylan film), Moondance Alexander, The Final Season
    6. Surf lolcats.
    7. Get up, shower, wear my favorite shirt (Death Cab for Cutie) and jeans. Also Doc Martens.
    8. Lounge around lookin fine
    9. Blog
    10. Read other blogs
    11. Fix Husband’s website
    12. Make tomato sandwich for lunch. Eat leftover bacon. Drink Diet Dr. Pepper with maraschino cherries out of a wine glass.
    13. Pet / annoy cats
    14. Go thorough boys’ Halloween candy. Eat Take 5 bar and Almond Joy.
    15. Eat pizza for dinner
    16. Seuss-a-Palooza! Read to boys: The Sneetches, The Zax, The Pale Green Pants, Too Many Daves (a personal favorite, I used to have it memorized), Horton Hears a Who
    17. Go to be early
    18. Read string theory, quantum physics

    Ahh, perfection. I honestly can’t see any room for improvement.

  • Superman vs. iPod

    Superman vs. iPod

    Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg independently discovered a physical effect known as giant magnetoresistance, which gave the technology used to read data on hard disks a literal quantum leap toward today’s itty-bitty (technical term) computers like iPods. So yesterday these dudes got the “You just won the Nobel Prize for Physics” call (I always imagine this call being made by Bert Parks). And much speech-making ensued.

    My favorite quote from the Nobel prize-related speeches yesterday was from Ben Murdin, Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey, who said: “A computer hard disk reader that uses a GMR sensor is equivalent to a jet flying at a speed of 30,000 kilometres per hour — roughly once round the globe in a single hour — at a height of just one metre above the ground, and yet being able to see and catalogue every single blade of grass it passes over.”

    Not quite as fast as Superman that time he had to turn the Earth backwards to save Lois Lane, but still pretty darn fast.

    Image by James Jordan on Flickr